K12 online review 2

The second video I watched was What did you do in school, yesterday, today, and three years ago? by H Songhai. The main thing to take away from this presentation is that there is so much technoogy that can be used in the classroom available to us, and as such we as educators should be using it to enhance the learning environment. He starts off by telling the viewers of a trip he took to the Bahamas, and that he took pictures on a digital camera, and even set the camera up on a rock so that he could record himself talking to the camera. Why did he do this? One word, Proof. He had proof that he was there. A term that he used that struck me as pretty neat was “gadget play”. Most if not all students has high tech gadgets, and all they really do on them is text or listen to music. The thing that does not even occur to students is that these tools can be used to document their learning career as well as thier lives. These high tech gadgets can be used in a number of ways to ensure that learning is present in everyday life. The problem is that students don’t realize this. Therefore it is up to the educators to awaken our students to the seemingly endless possibilities that technology provides for the classroom. He goes on to explain that digital archiving begins with personal learning networks. In these networks, we have at our fingertips, and infinte amount of information. He goes on to explain that he has had a paperless classroom for the last three years thanks to the use of blogging. Blogging allows the students to take control of thier learning. There are no longer any excuses like i lost my assignment. But perhaps the most valuable part of blogging is that thier whole educational career is documented and availabe to the students, for their entire lives. Another thing that he does in his classroom is, he buys three newspapers a week and “digitalizes” them and stores them on a hard drive so that anyone in the school can use them. An impotant tool that he sugests is almost a necessity is screen capturing tools. They allow for the documentation of learning to flourish. For his conclusion, he listed must have tools for the classroom. They are as follows: Delicious, Audacity, Skype, Wiki, Twitter, Google Notebook, Google Book Search, and Project Guttenberg. He ended by asking the question, “What did you do in school today?” and stated that he hopes the answer is, We used technology in the classroom, but in a way that keeps track of our learning, and in a way that enhances the learning.

So what did I think. Again this was a very good presentation. The ideas that were presented make sense in his classroom. I must confess something, I am not a fan of blogging and I don’t kn ow how much I will use blogs in my classroom. That said, H Songhai made me rethink this postion I have. I understand the importance of blogging in the classroom, at least from an educational stand point. But I am still not sure of the use of blogs (ironic isn’t that I am telling you this in a blog). If nothing else this presentation opened my eys to a number of possibilites for the classroom. I have a deeper understanding now of why and how these so called high tech gadgets should be used in the learning process.

All in all, it was a good presentation that has got me thinking again. It makes me try and figure out what kind of things I want to do in my classroom.